I love a good interview. To me, there’s nothing so useful for demystifying the creative process as hearing an artist or entrepreneur speak from a very personal perspective about how, and why, they do what they do. This weekend, I combed through my archive of epic and inspiring interviews and came up with this shortlist. Straight talk from Ernest Hemingway, Dieter Rams, Patti Smith, Steve Jobs, Ansel Adams, Tina Brown, Chuck Close and more.

Conducted by the late Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton in Madrid, this interview with Ernest Hemingway is an absolute knockout. The excerpt comes from the intro, where Plimpton describes Hemingway’s workspace in detail.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

“Physically, mentally, I have to prepare myself for a feat of endurance. I became a vegetarian, I did deep meditation, I cleansed myself. I train the body and the mind. I learn to eat certain foods so that I don’t have to go to the toilet for seven hours. I learn to sleep in short bursts at night. This is very hard: sleep, wake, drink, pee, exercise, sleep, wake and on and on. So even the not-performing is intense.”

The sitting-still, she says, was the worst part and choosing a wooden chair without armrests her biggest mistake. “This one detail makes it hellish. The shoulders sag, the arms swell, the pain starts to increase. Then the ribs are going into the organs. I had an incredible amount of physical pain and even some out-of-body experiences where the pain just vanishes, but always it comes back. In the end, it comes down to pure dedication and discipline.”

Jobs: As you know, most of what I’ve done in my career has been software. The Apple II wasn’t much software, but the Mac was just software in a cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn’t run on any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software. And what we’ve done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson. When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk. So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else they won’t take it.

What we learned was that the reward can’t be one and a half times better or twice as good. That’s not enough. The reward has to be like three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the mainstream.

The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter of fact, I think that the leap that we’ve made is at least five years ahead of anybody.

…

Interviewer: You can’t open the paper these days without reading about the Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?

Jobs: The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I’m not very excited about that. I’m not excited about home shopping. I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.

In the last interview he ever gave, photographer Ansel Adams describes how he visualizes and then creates a photograph.

Interviewer: You have used the word “visualization” to describe the process of deciding in advance how a photo will look rather than just shooting away in the hope of getting something lucky. Would you say that’s the essence?

Adams: I’d say that’s the essence. There are two approaches. One is the contrived approach-when you’re in the studio and you set up your backgrounds and your subject and you work with lights, or when you arrange things in nature and try to make that work. The other approach – which I think is the more productive in the end-is straight photography. You come across a phenomenon in nature that you can visualize as an image. Then, if you have the craft, you proceed to make it. Without failure. In theory, I have no excuse for ever making a mistake. I might not have an expressive picture, but at least I should capture everything I want – providing I don’t make some misjudgment or some stupid arithmetic error. I can be working on a close-up subject and forget to account for the extension of the limb. And I can put on a filter and not give the proper exposure factor and all that. Those things happen to everybody – to me, too – and it can be very embarrassing.

I think of Stieglitz’s definition of photography – a paraphrase of what I heard him say many times. In the earlier days, when people were very scornful of what he called “creative photography” or “photography as art,” they would ask: “Mr. Stieglitz, how do you go about making the creative photograph?” He would answer, “When I have a desire to photograph, I go out in the world with my camera. I come across something that excites me emotionally and esthetically. I’m creatively excited. I see the picture in my mind’s eye and I make the exposure and I give you the print as the equivalent of what I saw and felt.” The word “equivalent” is very important. It’s two things – what is seen and what is felt about it. That’s why the naturalistic element in photography is very important. When you intentionally depart from the natural situation you can get into trouble. Unless you depart far enough.

Braun signal radio ABR 21. Designed by Dieter Rams.

5. Dieter Rams, Industrial Designer /// 2010
Famous for his “Ten Principles for Good Design,” Dieter Rams was the legendary design director at German electronics manufacturer Braun. This interview catches him just before a recent retrospective at the Design Museum in London called Less And More.

Interviewer: Your phrase “less but better” was initially read as an endorsement for purity in design. But it has been adopted as an environmental message about reduction and sustainability. What does the global community need to do to address that secondary message?

Rams: We live today with a lot of chaos, and designers should concentrate on helping to lighten the chaos, including the noise. Nobody notices any more that we’re living with a lot of noise. We don’t register the chaos; sometimes, yes, when we are in the middle of traffic or running late, we discover that everything is chaotic around us. It’s London, it’s Frankfurt it’s Berlin—it’s what Corbusier used to say about New York in the ’30s: It’s a “wonderful catastrophe”. Now all our cities around the world are wonderful catastrophes. We have to think much more about what we really need: how often we need things and how many we need. If we want to stay on this planet 50 years from now then we have to take that more seriously.

Interviewer: For many people the chaos in the environment is mirrored in their own personal spaces, in the jumble of belongings. Is clutter ever a positive thing?

Rams: In your personal surroundings there should be places where you have some disorder, so that you find the other places that are in order. Order with disorder—the contrast—can be sometimes fascinating. You have to have the difference; otherwise, you forget the feeling for order, for the necessary things.

Interviewer: You’ve both been subjected to bad press along the way. How have you handled it?

Huffington: I definitely consider it a barometer of my spiritual progress how I handle it. I don’t like the idea of a thick skin. I think we can be more childlike. Children get upset and they cry and it’s over; six seconds later, it’s like nothing happened. That is my aspiration.

Brown: I much less care about it than I used to. I went through Talk magazine, and once you’ve been pilloried on the front page of the New York Post, you do go through a kind of liberation. I took a huge belly flop in a very public fashion. After that, it was like, “So what? It wasn’t so bad. I’m still here.” It was probably the happiest couple of years of my life after that, suddenly having permission to meet my daughter at school and go and see a friend in the hospital. When I did the Beast, it was really for fun, and I wasn’t sitting there worrying about it. [Bad press] can ruin an hour of your morning – but I haven’t had that experience for a while, actually. I don’t have a Google alert [for myself]; I don’t care enough [laughs].

Huffington: That’s probably the most important message that we can give to younger women. I constantly talk to my daughters about my failures. The other day, Christina was saying, Oh no, Mom, not again about your first book being rejected by 36 publishers. Because in the end, if you look at what makes people succeed, especially women, it’s about not giving up.

Brown: You know, a friend of mine has a great saying: There’s nobody more boring than the undefeated [laughs]. Any big career will have bad times as well as good. I’m sure, Arianna, your blacker periods have really been a source of learning.

7. R. Crumb, Comic Artist /// June 2010
This recent interview with comic artist R. Crumb inaugurated the Paris Review‘s “art of comics” interview series. Here, Crumb talks about knocking on doors to get his start as a kid.

Interviewer: It must have been amazing to discover the mimeograph.

Crumb: Well, I remember the first time I did a comic strip on it, I was in seventh grade and seeing that printed was really a thrill. There were fifty copies of it. Wow! The power of print! And then when I was fifteen my brother and I did kind of a Mad [magazine] imitation called Foo and we intended to print it, then sell it. We had jobs and we paid to have it printed on a Xerox machine where my father worked, and he ran off three hundred copies for us. It was very crudely printed, early Xerox where the blacks don’t fill in solid black. But even that was a thrill to see. But we couldn’t get people to buy it, it was devastating. We ended up going around door-to-door in this big tract-housing development in Dover, Delaware, near the Air Force base, and lying to the people, telling them it was an art project for school. That was the only way they would buy it.

Interviewer: What were you charging?

Crumb: Ten cents. We’d hand it to them or they would say, Let me see that, and they’d look at it and say, What is this? Well, it’s a comic book we drew ourselves. Foo, what does that mean? They didn’t get it, and they didn’t want to buy it. Some people would interrogate us, You sure this money’s going to the school, who’s your art teacher over there? We told them the name of the art teacher, we said yeah, it’s for school. Nobody ever called the school. But, it’s a fucking dime, come on! Two guys selling these comics they drew themselves, these people they didn’t give a shit, it didn’t impress them at all. It really traumatized us about the comic-book business. We could do the drawing fine, pretty good and professional for our age, but the business end of it, boy, that was rough. We ended up burning most of them in the backyard.

Patti Smith, circa 1969. Photograph: Judy Linn.

8. Patti Smith, Musician & Writer /// 2010Interview magazine editor-at-large Christopher Bollen talks to rock icon Patti Smith upon the release of her incredible memoir, Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Here, she discusses the habits we bind to our creative process:

Interviewer: I can drink an endless amount of coffee. I’m sure one day that will catch up with me.

Smith: I used to drink like 14 cups a day. I was a pretty speedy person, but I never noticed. Then, when I was pregnant, I had to give up coffee. After that, I cut down to five or six cups. Ever since I hit 60, I drink only two. What I do is I get an Americano and a pot of water and I keep diluting it, because it’s not even the coffee, it’s the habit.

Interviewer: That’s my problem. I really don’t smoke cigarettes that much except when I write. But when I write, I smoke. It’s bad, but I’m scared that if I break the habit, I won’t be able to write.

Smith: It’s part of your process. It’s what you have to do. I’ll tell you how to break it. You don’t have to. Like, coffee was part of my process. Now, if I want to go to a café and write and drink coffee for two hours, I just order them. I don’t drink them. A lot is just aesthetic. So you light your cigarette and let it sit there and don’t smoke it.

Interviewer: Do you think that would work?

Smith: If you attach anything harmful to the creative process, you have to do that. If you learn nothing else from me, this is a really important lesson. I’ve seen a lot of people go down because they attach a substance to their creative process. A lot of it is purely habitual. They don’t need it, but they think they do, so it becomes entrenched. Like, I can’t go without my coffee. I can go without drinking it, but I can’t go without it nearby. It’s the feeling of how cool I feel with my coffee. Because I don’t feel cool with this tea. [Bollen laughs] You know, there are pictures of me with cigarettes in the ’70s, and everybody thought I smoked. I can’t smoke because I had TB when I was a kid. But I loved the look of smoking — like Bette Davis and Jeanne Moreau. So I would have cigarettes and just light ‘em and take a couple puffs, but mostly hold them. Some people said that was hypocritical. But in my world, it wasn’t hypocritical at all. I wasn’t interested in actually smoking them. I just liked holding them to look cool. All right, was it a bad image to show people? I’m happy to let people know I wasn’t really smoking.

Interviewer: I think it’s almost part of the romance of creating. As an artist, you kind of have to buy into your own romance a bit when you are making work.

Smith: Yep. Except for me, I haven’t really changed at all since I was 11. I still dress the same. I still have the same manners of study. Like when I was a kid, I wanted to write a poem about Simon Bolivar. I went to the library and read everything I could. I wrote copious notes. I had 40 pages of notes just to write a small poem. So my process hasn’t changed much.

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.

Virtually everything I’ve done has been a product of — or has been influenced by — my learning disabilities. I don’t recognize faces, and I don’t remember names, either. But I have almost perfect photographic memory for things that are two-dimensional.

The choice not to do something is almost always more interesting than the choice to do something.

I wasn’t a good student, I wasn’t an athlete, and I think that helped focus me early in my life. I distinguished myself by being more intensely engaged and more intensely focused because I knew if I blew this art thing, I’d be screwed.

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.

There are stars whose light only reaches the earth long after they have fallen apart. There are people whose remembrance gives light in this world, long after they have passed away. This light shines in our darkest nights on the road we must follow. – The Talmud

That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.)

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)

In each of the stanza, Yeats folds his poetry around the creative spark – the genius of mind. In the first is Ceasar, in the second Helen, and the third Michelangelo. Interestingly, Yeats doesn’t confine himself to artists – Ceasar wasn’t; neither was Helen. In one sense, Yeats could be celebrating the genius creativity as being more than just the province of the artist. On the other hand, Yeats could also be suggesting that all human endeavors, whether Ceasar’s territorial, empire-building ambition which Yeats frames as “civilization” (perhaps man’s greatest collective accomplishment), or Helen’s physical grace and beauty, are expressions of artistic genius and creativity. The meaning could be either or could be both. Unlike some analysts, I like to think that the goal is not to guess at what Yeats intended, but to offer the possibilities presented by the poem itself.

The dog and pony are tethered far from Caesar’s hearing. The work of man, and by extension mankind, will not tolerate the presence of animals. Helen, for her part, represents a nexus through which history will move because of her beauty and grace. Without her, history cannot act on human events and cannot inspire Homer, Virgil or Christopher Marlowe to write about them. With this in mind, it may be deliberate that Yeats paraphrases Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus.

FAUSTUS. Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium–
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.–
[Kisses her.]
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!–
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

Perhaps Yeats is suggesting that it is through her, symbolically a woman’s beauty, that art is made possible – that Marlowe’s lines were made possible. But, like Caesar, that creative act of her self-making, the making of her beauty, cannot be disturbed – needs quiet, needs silence for her genius to express itself. But perhaps Yeats intends another sense too. Describing her as three-parts child, one part woman, Yeats describes her innocence. She thinks that nobody looks. Her creative act is pure, without guile, without knowledge of the lascivious observer. Like the long legged fly upon the stream, her mind moves upon silence.

The reference to her picking up a tinker shuffle on the street, could be a reference to the poem itself – a poem based on ballad meter, one that Yeats could have picked up on the street. In this sense, Yeats could be treating Helen as the muse of poetry, shaping a simple rhythm into a poetry that will shape history and men’s thoughts. She becomes a sort of patron Saint of poetry.

In the final stanza Yeats suggests Michelangelo’s creation of David. Michelangelo is the indisputably great artist – the only Artist of the three. But Yeats writes about more than Michelangelo. Michelangelo’s art will inspire a sexual awareness such that ” “the girls at puberty may find the first Adam in their thought”. It is, like the creative act of Caesar and Helen, a nexus of through which history will act, through which their will be further creation – procreation of the girls and their lovers – the single most profound and powerful act of creation which mankind is capable of.

So it is that Yeats moves from the creation of civilization through arms, the creation of art in symbolically graceful and beautiful Helen, to the great procreative act – the creation of ourselves. In this guise, perhaps, Yeats might have intended Michelangelo to symbolize God’s own creation of man, or better, man’s own re-creation of himself.

But keep the children out.

Curiously, Yeats must have known there would be no children in the Pope’s Chapel – no girls. I’m inclined to think that, by children, Yeats was referring to the Pope, (along with his attendant Bishops, etc…) This would imply a criticism of religion. The Pope and his attendants, the “children”, would presumably interfere with Michelangelo’s creative genius. That is, Michelangelo’s work was not meant for them, the unimaginative and spiritually naive “children” of the church, but for the pubescent girls – who would immediately, if instinctively, comprehend the meaning (the creative power and genius) of Michelangelo’s work. They, the girls, would understand what the children, the Pope and the Bishops, could not.

The supreme act of creation, the genius of mind, moves outside its own awareness – becomes like the long legged fly that moves upon the stream or the the source of being and mind. It must not be observed lest the mind too, become aware of itself, and so slip from the supple surface of its contemplation. The beautiful metaphor of the fly upon the stream is Yeats’ expression of true genius – the state in which great art is produced. Though the maps are spread before him, Caesar gazes on nothing.

“We’ve gone through the operating system and looked at everything and asked how can we simplify this and make it more powerful at the same time.” – ABC News, Jobs on Mac OS X Beta

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”

“Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.” –Wikiquote, Interview in Rolling Stone magazine, no. 684 (16 June 1994)

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” – The New York Times, Creating Jobs, 1997

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.” – YouTube

“My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.” – All About Steve Jobs

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” – Wikiquote, as quoted in Fortune magazine (4 January 2000)

“Click. Boom. Amazing!” – Macworld keynote 2006

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Inc. Magazine

“That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” –New York Times, The Guts of a New Machine, 2003

“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?” – As quoted or paraphrased in Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own (2009) by Robert Tuchman

“I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.” – CNNMoney

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.” – CNNMoney

“So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.” – CNNMoney

“When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself.
They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.” – via

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” – Fortune

“Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” – Fortune

“So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.” – Classic Gaming

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.” – Macworld

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.” – Wikiquote, as quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer

“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” – Businessweek

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” –Businessweek

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Businessweek, 1998

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” – Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.” – Playboy interview, 1985

“I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.” – Playboy, 1987

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” – Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” – Steve Jobs’ famous question to John Sculley, former Apple CEO

“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” – As quoted in Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” – Fortune, 1996

“You know, I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can’t say any more than that it’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.” – Fortune, 1995

“Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could — I’m searching for the right word — could, could die.” – TIME, 1997

If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.Theodore Roosevelt

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.Theodore Roosevelt

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.Theodore Roosevelt

It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things.Theodore Roosevelt

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.Theodore Roosevelt

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.Theodore Roosevelt

Dear God, you made many, many poor people. I realize, of course, that
It’s no great shame to be poor but it’s no great honor, either. So what would have
Been the difference if I had a small fortune?

If I were a rich man
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work hard
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
If I were a biddy-biddy rich
Daidle deedle daidle daidle man

I’d build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen
Right in the middle of the town
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below
There would be one long staircase just going up
And one even longer coming down
And one more leading nowhere, just for show

I’d fill my yard with chicks and turkeys and geese
And ducks for the town to see and hear
Squawking just as noisily as they can
And each loud “pa-pa-geeee! pa-pa-gaack! pa-pa-geeee! pa-pa-gaack!”
Would land like a trumpet on the ear
As if to say, “Here lives a wealthy man.”
Oy

If I were a rich man
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work hard
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
If I were a biddy-biddy rich
Daidle deedle daidle daidle man

I see my wife, my Golde, looking like a rich man’s wife
With a proper double chin
Supervising meals to her heart’s delight
I see her putting on airs and strutting like a peacockOy! What a happy mood she’s in
Screaming at the servants day and night

The most important men in town will come to fawn on me–
They will ask me to advise them
Like a Solomon the Wise–
“If you please, Reb Tevye?”–
“Pardon me, Reb Tevye?”–
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi’s eyes–

Ya va voy, ya va voy voy vum

And it won’t make one bit of difference
If I answer right or wrong–
When you’re rich, they think you really know

If I were rich, I’d have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall
And I’d discuss the learned books with the holy men
Seven hours every day–
That would be the sweetest thing of all
Oy

If I were a rich man
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum
If I were a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work hard
Daidle deedle daidle
Daidle daidle deedle daidle dum
Lord who made the lion and the lamb
You decreed I should be what I am–
Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan
If I were a wealthy man

The title is inspired by a 1902 monologue by Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish, Ven ikh bin Rothschild (If I were Rothschild), a reference to the wealth of the Rothschild family, although the content is quite different. The lyric is based in part on passages from Sholem Aleichem’s 1899 short story “The Bubble Bursts.” Both stories appeared in English in the 1949 collection of stories Tevye’s Daughters.

The song is broken into four verses, with a bridge between the third and fourth and a chorus sung at the beginning of the song, and after the second and fourth verses.

Through the first two verses, Tevye dreams of the material comforts that wealth would bring him. Sung boisterously and comedically, Tevye first considers the enormous house he would buy and the needless luxuries he would fill it with, including a third staircase “leading nowhere, just for show,” then the poultry he would buy to fill his yard.

Tevye switches his attention to the luxuries in which he would shower his wife, Golde, in the third verse. He talks of servants to alleviate her workload, fancy clothes for her pleasure, and mountains of food. The song is sung in the same boisterous, comedic style.

The music and vocals intensify during the bridge, when Tevye starts lamenting his place in the community as a lowly milkman, and considers the esteem and importance that wealth would bring him.

In the final verse, Tevye softens as he further considers his devotion to God. He expresses his sorrow that the long working hours he keeps prevents him from spending as much time in the synagogue as he would like, and how wealth would allow him to spend less time working and more time praying and studying Torah.

A repeated phrase throughout the song, “all day long I’d bidi-bidi-bum,” is often misunderstood to refer to Tevye’s desire not to have to work. However, the phrase “bidi-bidi-bum” is a reference to the practice of Jewish prayer, in particular davening.

Cover versions and translations

The Hebrew version lyrics (first released in 1965) are taken directly from the original Sholem Aleichem story. The title and chorus are “לו הייתי רוטשילד” Lu hayiti Rotshild: ‘If I were Rothschild’.

Song written by Bart Howard in 1954. It was titled originally “In Other Words”, and was introduced by Felicia Sanders in cabarets. The song became known popularly as “Fly Me to the Moon” from its first line, and after a few years the publishers changed the title to that officially. Recorded: June 9, 1964

Excerpt: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke was a great poet who had a correspondence over the course of several years with Franz Xaver Kappus, the “young poet” to whom Rilke became a mentor.
Worpswede, near Bremen, Germany
July 16th, 1903
. . . Very dear Mr. Kappus: I have left a letter from you long unanswered, not that I had forgotten it—on the contrary: . . . When I read it, as now, . . . I am touched by your beautiful concern about life, more even than I had felt it [when I first read your letter] in Paris . . . Here, where an immense country lies about me, over which the winds pass coming from the seas, here I feel that no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings that deep within them have a life of their own; for even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things . . . You are so young,1 so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

The word “philosophy” comes from ancient Greek roots meaning the love (philo) of knowledge or wisdom (sophia). In this letter Rilke suggests that philosophy is also a love of the questions themselves.

Rilke was a great believer in patience, in not rushing natural processes, which can only bear their fruit in their own time. Here he sees spiritual searching as a kind of natural process, which begins with certain deeply felt questions that “have a life of their own” and must not be rushed to answers. If a question has come to us from an honest perplexity and desire to understand, then that question itself is already a great achievement, and Rilke suggests we cherish it. If we are “living” the question, not just as an intellectual problem or puzzle that we are curious to solve, but as something that truly matters to us, then we are already on the road to understanding.

Philosophy may seem to be an endless series of questions, with each suggested answer leading only to more questions. Rilke invites us to see this not as a problem, but as a deep necessity of life, since “no human being anywhere can answer for you” those ultimate questions of life. Even if you could be led right to an answer, still it would not do you any good, and it would not be your answer, unless you could see it with your own eyes–answers “cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”2 So until the time when we are ready to find an answer ourselves, the best we can do is to contemplate the question.

One of the greatest philosophers of Western thought, Socrates himself, famously claimed to never have reached any answers at all. Perhaps all he ever had were the questions. But to ask the big questions of life, to truly grapple with them, this is already to be a philosopher and to have deepened one’s experience of life.